anecdotal story. i was just starting to work on team who had previously been crafting their own C based XML reader/writer program. The XML was coming from and going to a third party who had a well defined XSD Schema. A schema that was perpetually changing. The program was *fraught* with errors. i mean lots of level 1 defects...elements in the wrong place, incorrect escaping, etc. the datafiles were up to 1 gig in size (input and output files).

i was tasked with building a replacement. a system architect recommended an approach that used a OOP language and a XML parsing library that could generate an object model from a given XSD.

the initial release had its issue as it was new tech for the company but after that the defect count literally fell to zero. and one dev maintained it part time instead of two working on the C version full time.

RegEx can give you headaches, if there are libraries then using them is a good advice._________________"Defeat is a state of mind. No one is ever defeated, until defeat has been accepted as a reality." -- Bruce Lee

RegEx can give you headaches, if there are libraries then using them is a good advice.

regex is probably the only thing I'm at all completely 100% comfortable with. In perl, that is, non-pcre is just infuriating, and why every regex i end up half-assing in something like sed, i end up eventually getting frustrated and throwing together something in perl to do $task.